About the project

EssenInternational had the assignment to rebrand Stockholms stad. It was initiated by the need to coherently communicate a wide range of offerings, everything from world museums to scavenging.

Implementation to all digital channels

Together with Cruena Sweden, we applied the new graphical identity to several of City of Stockholms websites. My main roll was to build the digital brand manual and to consult the design implementation across all digital channels.

Our team

St. Erik is the City's logo and crest – Since the 1300s, he appeared on the city seal. The main design elements to implement were an updated St. Erik emblem, a custom made typeface and a new color palette together with a brand platform which united all public authorities under one brand – the city of Stockholm.

One city. One vision. One statement.

On the digital side Stockholm has a wide range of websites and applications, from school and museum websites to applications for buying parking tickets. The social media platform pages, such as Twitter and Facebook pages, also needed guidelines on how to apply the design.

Mock-ups – We started to test the new design on Stockholm.se as well as on the website for Stockholm’s city museum, the information website Stockholm is growing and the application Discover Stockholm - which were important parts of the implementation. We basically did hundreds of mock-ups, testing the typeface as well as color variations and different icon-styles.

Final designs – After testing a lot of variations it became apparent that we should not overload the users impression with to much color variations and imagery, instead we focused on clear typography and used colors mostly to define function.

An important thing to consider was the availability aspect. The goal is that the city's websites must meet W3C accessibility guidelines WCAG 2.0 on level AA and E-delegation guidelines to the corresponding level.

Learnings – It was a pleasure to meet all of the people who worked on the project from the departments of Stockholm city as well as from Creuna. And it was a great experience to work on a project of that size and scale.